Health care emerging as potent issue in Democratic race

WASHINGTON -- Testimony to the building potency of health care in the Democratic presidential race, Bill Bradley threw his sharpest elbow yet at Al Gore, questioning on Monday the vice president's loyalty to ''fundamental Democratic principle'' as each candidate issued yet another health wish list.

The vice president, making a campaign stop at Center Pharmacy in Washington, proposed several measures to speed cheaper generic drugs to market. Bradley, speaking to the American Public Health Association in Chicago, outlined how he would spend an additional $2 billion each year on public health.

More striking, though, for Bradley, who insisted he would remain above conventional politics, was the sniping that he wove into his policy announcement.

The former New Jersey senator likened the attacks on his $65 billion health plan by Gore to the ''political opportunism of Newt Gingrich'' and congressional Republicans that brought down the 1993 Clinton-Gore proposal for universal health insurance.

''I can't say that the solution they came up with was exactly right ... but they were on to the problem,'' said Bradley, who has proposed eliminating Medicaid and offering insurance premium subsidies to get health coverage to 95 percent of Americans.

Using the ''stay and fight'' phrase that Gore has used to slap Bradley for leaving the Senate, Bradley continued:

''In the case of health care, Al Gore decided it wasn't worth standing and fighting. He abandoned that fundamental Democratic principle of basic health care for all Americans he had talked about so much in the campaign of 1992.''

After reviewing the former New Jersey senator's remarks, Gore fired off a statement calling Bradley's ''a flawed trillion-dollar plan that will cost the American people even more in the long run.''

He again challenged Bradley -- ''How about it, Bill?'' -- to a debate on health care while his aides trumpeted a re-evaluation of Bradley's health plan released Monday by Emory University professor Kenneth E. Thorpe.

Thorpe, whose first 10-year cost estimate of $1.2 trillion created a brouhaha, reduced the figure by $142 billion using new detail on subsidy caps included in Bradley's plan.

Still, Thorpe maintained Monday that Bradley's plan would give health coverage to 89 percent of the uninsured population -- not 95 percent as Bradley insists -- and cover 3 million Americans more than Gore's $312 billion proposal primarily aimed at children.

Bradley spokeswoman Kristen Ludecke dismissed Thorpe, a former Clinton-Gore administration official, as a Gore partisan and his analysis as ''not credible.''

Asked about Bradley's more intense rhetoric, another Bradley aide explained privately that the senator, who said for weeks that he could only take so many ''elbows'' from Gore, was increasingly ''galled'' by the barbs.

Recent polls suggest another possible motive: During the same period of time that Gore launched his criticism of Bradley, Bradley's early-autumn surge in national polls sagged and Gore's edge inched back up.

On Monday, Gore spokesman Chris Lehane threw back at Bradley the same labels -- timid, negative, politics-as-usual -- with which Bradley's tried to taint Gore.

''Acting like a typical politician, Sen. Bradley can't defend the merits of his health care plan with facts and thus he has desperately resorted to waging a negative campaign,'' Lehane said.

''Apparently it's because he's too timid to explain to the American people why his plan in one fell swoop imperils Medicare, gets rid of Medicaid and busts the budget surplus leaving no money for other priorities such as education,'' the spokesman said.

Health care -- worries about HMO restrictions, plus the problems of the uninsured -- is ''a good hot issue'' that ranks in the top tier for voters this season, said independent pollster Andrew Kohut.

Kohut seconded Bradley's observation that, by painting Bradley's costs as astronomical, Gore's assault resembles the Republican campaign to undermine public support for President Clinton's 1993 proposal.

Whether it will work for Gore is an open question.

''This time, we're not talking about a specific proposal that could be put into law,'' said Kohut. ''We're talking still in the realm of ideas and voters could say, 'It's just politics, this argument between Bradley and Gore.'''

On policy, Gore called for legislation that would make it harder for drug companies to get extensions on drug patents, which delay the ability of other companies to market generic versions of the drugs.

Patent extensions should be considered as separate legislation and not ''attached to larger pieces of legislation in the middle of the night by special interests,'' Gore said.

Bradley called for increased federal funds for community health centers, a stronger role for the Centers for Disease Control in researching effective public health education strategies, and a new Institute of Community-based Public Health Sciences at the National Institutes of Health.